Ghost Night by Heather Graham Read Free Book Online Page B

been kids living almost four hundred miles away from one another even if it was the same state, but they’d kept up as much as possible, visiting one another at their respective colleges and meeting whenever they could.
    By the time they had been able to get together in Key West, or anywhere in the Keys, Sean had been gonemost of the time, so it really wasn’t that strange that she’d never had a chance to meet him before.
    It seemed odd that the O’Haras could so clearly resemble one another and yet look so different. When she’d asked Jamie O’Hara what Sean looked like, he told her that Katie was Sean in a dress. That wasn’t true at all. Sean was very tall, three or four inches over six feet, with a linebacker’s shoulders. Katie was slim and willowy. While Katie had auburn hair, Sean’s was lighter, though with the same streaks of red. Katie’s eyes were a hazel green while Sean’s were more of a golden color. He had almost classic features, just like Katie, but he looked like a man who had braved the wind many a time, and his jaw leaned toward the square side.
    Maybe that had just been because he’d been talking to her—and she sensed that she’d irritated him.
    “Maybe I should have mentioned first that I knew you both,” Vanessa said dryly to Katie.
    Katie smiled and swirled a stirrer in her coffee cup. “Ha-ha. Perhaps he’s feeling as if we’re ganging up on him! Oh, well, Sean is just being—Sean. He’ll get over it. Really, I think the lure of the mystery will get to him, once he thinks it all out. I think.” She looked at Vanessa with concern. “But…are you sure you should be doing this? Maybe you should just leave it all alone.”
    “You know I can’t do that—you know you couldn’t do that! Hey, I’ve talked to people around here. You plunged headfirst into finding out what had happened in David’s past, a pretty dangerous occupation, so I heard,” Vanessa said.
    “Yes, but I didn’t realize at the beginning that therewere going to be more bodies,” Katie murmured. “And David was determined.”
    “All right, then, let me put it this way—could you just forget about it? Katie, I saw that poor girl the night she disappeared—and wound up dead. She was terrified. There was something on that beach. Other people go over there still, despite what happened.”
    Katie frowned. “But nothing has happened since, right?”
    “Not on Haunt Island,” Vanessa said.
    “What happened otherwise?” Katie asked.
    “In two years’ time? I don’t know everything, but I’m suspicious every time I hear about any bad things happening. I know about one boat that disappeared in that area. A charter boat on its way to Bimini about a year ago. Disappeared, as in vanished.”
    “Things don’t really disappear in the Bermuda Triangle,” Katie said. “It was just that for years, we didn’t know what had happened. But they found the planes that went down years ago, after World War II. They finally found them. No one knows why they went down, but they certainly have educated theories. So a charter boat didn’t really disappear —it’s out there somewhere.”
    “Well, one of Jay’s boats disappeared,” Vanessa said flatly. “It disappeared—and Travis and Georgia were found dead on the beach.”
    Katie looked at her sympathetically. “The Bahamian authorities, Florida State authorities, and even the FBI got in on the investigation, Vanessa. There’s a problem with the ocean—when things go down, they may go down miles. There are storms, there are currents. Therewere no clues on the island.” She cleared her throat. “They, um, never found the rest of the bodies, right?”
    Vanessa shook her head. “I’d say they actively investigated for months…maybe even a year. The torsos, hips and legs were never found. God, I can’t even believe I’m saying that!”
    “But there was a suspect, right? Carlos…someone?”
    “Carlos Roca,” Vanessa told her. “But he was a good guy. A